Which is the greater menace to democracy and political discourse: the right-left megaphones of Fox News and MSNBC on the one hand, or Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who would destroy the First Amendment in order, he assures us, to save it?

“We need new catalysts for quality news and entertainment programming,” the Democrat from West Virginia declared at a recent Senate hearing on television retransmission consent. “I hunger for quality news. I’m tired of the right and the left. There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to Fox and to MSNBC, ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; to our ability to do our work here in Congress; and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and, more importantly, in their future.”

Never mind the awkward detail that the Federal Communications Commission’s power to say “Goodbye” applies to broadcast licenses. Rockefeller’s forte is not facts. Last year, when he wondered fancifully whether it “would have been better if we had never invented the Internet,” he was equally cavalier in hyping the threat to the defense department from daily cyber attacks.

An ignoramus we can live with. It’s the bully, the censor, and the preening authoritarian who must be checked. On this occasion, however, the bully should also be thanked, since he has provided a moment of clarity in the debate over regulation of political speech.

As Radley Balko of Reason.com was quick to point out, “Perhaps the Citizens United-hating hysterics at MSNBC will now start to see how easy it is for politicians to jump from banning critical campaign ads to openly pining for the ability to censor any and all of their critics, and with the same . . . justifications — improving political discourse and restoring faith in government.”

Citizens United, you may recall, is the Supreme Court ruling of early this year overturning some restrictions on corporate and union speech. And while much of that speech does indeed take the form of political ads, as Balko suggests, the case itself was triggered by censorship of a 90-minute video released by a nonprofit corporation supported mostly by individual donations. Moreover, during oral arguments before the court, the government admitted that existing law would allow it even to ban political books in certain cases.

Rockefeller’s sinister if honest musings reveal the broader mindset behind the drive by the political class — mainly Democrats but with a contingent of Republicans — to regulate political speech that actually should enjoy the highest protection under the First Amendment.

These guys don’t want to improve political discourse. They want to control it, to limit it.

Hence the nostalgia among many of those who deplore the offspring of media diversity for the days before cable and the Internet — you know, that golden era when, as Sen. Michael Bennet recalls, we would go “home at night, turn the TV on, watch Walter Cronkite for half an hour, turn it off and get about our business.”

In this image from Norman Rockwell, Americans contented themselves with a few easily digestible snacks of news while presumably sparing those conducting the important work in Washington from pesky second-guessing.

This deeply patronizing vision was not even true in Cronkite’s heyday, and it will certainly never be true in a digitized world in which people now write books like “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” about how to cope with information overload.

Or, more to the point, it will never be true so long as we faithfully resist the likes of Rockefeller, who would like to help the American people talk with each other by first stuffing a sock in their mouths.

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